


The Dumb Supper

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: A meditation on the nature of memory and self, Canonical Character Death, Disguised as absolute filth, Hell, M/M, the afterlife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-05 22:02:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10317935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: Night in hell.





	

**Author's Note:**

> While no warnings apply, the simple fact of the pairing may be enough to upset some readers. Please use your discretion.  
> If you think it's a line from Shakespeare, it's probably a line from Shakespeare. While I'm not trying to plagiarize a world-famous writer who's been dead for hundreds of years, I'm also not going to pick out and cite every instance, because I don't hate myself.  
> The summary of this story comes from A Season in Hell, by Arthur Rimbaud.  
> I am not involved in the production of Sleepy Hollow, and this school is not involved in the production of Sleepy Hollow. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

The dead still love the living. Just in a different way. It's like unto an alchemical process: sometimes, love is distilled, removed from its medium, made pure. Sometimes, it's mixed with something else, to a create a new compound. Death is a sea change, and all who have observed the sea know it to be a queer and unfathomable place. Thus, it may also be that the process works in reverse, leaving love corrupted, mired more than ever in the clay of its earthly origins. What is at work in him, Henry does not know. Magic isn't alchemy; it's instinctive, automatic, like falling asleep or waking up. Alchemy is a discipline; it can be learned, known. Magic is, of course, ever-unknown.  
Death is a long and congested dream. It's a dream of life. All that a life contained finds itself spit out into death. It is such stuff as dreams are made on. Strange new progressions down old roads, now knotted and digressing. Of course, Henry dreams of Ichabod. He will not call him “Father”.  
There is no embrace but the embrace of dust, to whom all return. Though, not Ichabod.   
Hell has mornings. It has noons, and nights. The nights are long, impenetrable, pitch painted onto a vaulted ceiling. There remains a light- in the distance, untouchable. Something shrieks in the night, and it sounds like music. The dead dream, but they don't sleep. At night, Henry wanders. He comes upon his fellow sinners. They sometimes want to speak to him, but he has no use for them. He finds strange, tender flowers that shrink from the light, blooming only in darkness. The sight of them makes something twitch, behind his ribs. He turns away, and keeps walking.  
The dead love the living, and they love life. Even if life held nothing for them but pain, they love it. No matter how long dead, they miss the land of the living. This place might have the semblance of it, but it's not the same. You know it's not the same. You feel it. You want to go home. You miss the things that you knew.  
Hell's gaudy puppets and spangled backdrops have the power to dazzle, though. And this, at least, can take away some of the pain.  
If only to replace it with a different one.  
When Henry returns to his abode, the door's open.  
“Who's there?” Henry calls, “What do you want?”  
“T'is bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.”  
Henry will not call him “Father”. “What do you want?” he repeats, more quietly, but no softer.  
“Won't you ask how it is that I came to be here?”  
Henry closes the door, rushes past Ichabod to turn on the light. “I know you're not him. You're some devil, sent to fool me. Well, fool me once...” he laughs bitterly.  
“Bid me leave.”  
As though stricken, Henry turns his head, looks at this Ichabod. The face is correct, but the features set in it, aslant, somehow. The very sight of it is wrong. It returns, the wet convulsion in his chest. “No,” he says slowly, for the joy of feeling it bloom into pain, “Stay, if you would.”  
“Won't you offer me refreshment?”  
Henry snorts. “That's what you do-- tempt poor souls to their doom with the semblance of earthly comforts.”  
“Am I here to tempt you, Henry?”  
“Well, now, I know that you're a fake; Ichabod would have called me 'Jeremy'.”  
“Shall I call you that? I had it that you preferred the name that you chose for yourself.”  
“Since when does it matter what I prefer?”  
“If I mean to tempt you, surely, it's of the utmost importance. Shall I tempt you? Henry.”  
Ichabod grasps him with strong hands. All at once, it's on Henry. An ocean of sin. All the sin in the world, it would seem. It's all for Henry, all for him. No one else. It's like electricity in his veins. It's the ocean's surface, thrashing in a tempest. It's like climbing into a warm bed.  
It's too much. It will devour him.  
Henry looks around, as though for some source of aid. He puts up his hands to push himself out of Ichabod's clutches, gets only as far as laying his hands on Ichabod's chest. Warmth radiates from the flesh beneath his clothes. The heart beats. Of course, Henry's own heart no longer does. It's the one detail that hell spares in its recreations. You must never forget that you're dead. The feeling of a living body is enough to make this almost bearable. Henry closes his eyes, silently resigns himself, lets himself be enfolded. He bows his head, rests it against Ichabod's breast. He feels Ichabod lay his hand on the back of his head.  
“This isn't real,” Henry murmurs.  
“You're dead, Henry. Nothing is real anymore.”  
“You're not him.”  
Ichabod pulls back a little bit so that Henry can behold him. “Am I not as you remember me?”  
“That doesn't make you him.”  
“Are we not all creatures of memory? How would you know Ichabod Crane if not for your memories of him?” He pulls Henry close to him again. Dreadfully close. Henry suddenly feels as though he were looking down from a great height.  
It's terrible. Henry could weep for the terror of it. It's freedom, though. Terrible freedom. No man in his right mind would want it. Henry's right mind, though, is ashes and dust. He has no brain, just as he has no heart.  
This thing that looks like Ichabod hungers without reason. This, Henry understands. When Henry lived, he knew the wordless, thoughtless need for vengeance. Even past the point when it resembled vengeance. As he died, he did forgive, but forgiveness is easy when you don't think that there's anything coming next. It's not so easy to forgive when you must then exist for an eternity without the comfort of your anger. This is a kind of vengeance.  
Ichabod's mouth is soft on his. It could be comfort, benediction.  
It's the pain of an old wound again injured.  
The chastity of the kiss is ruptured. Henry probes Ichabod's mouth, feels himself searched in return. What lingers where Henry's blood once was stirs. He slips his hands under Ichabod's coat, sounds the form beneath Ichabod's shirt. The material is what Henry remembers, from his earlier life. He never got used to the modern stuff he was obliged to wear. Maybe that's why he wears it, still. Pleasures may slip from memory or blend into a single body, but that which irritates does so forever with exacting resonance.  
This Ichabod's totally solid, anyway; not a shadow beneath his costume. Not a ghost. He responds like a living man, one whose heart still beats. He moves Henry's hand up under his shirt, brings it in contact with warm flesh. Further up, to his pounding heart. He holds it there. Lets Henry feel what he's missing.  
“Just take it off,” Henry mutters.  
“Here, in your drawing room?” Ichabod asks, wearing an amused expression Henry's never seen before.  
“Yes. Right here.”  
Henry stands back, watches Ichabod take off his jacket and shirt.  
“Take down your hair,” Henry says.  
The tawny curtain falls.  
“What will I do, now?” His expression remains the same. Perhaps there'll never be a time when he's not laughing at Henry.  
“Come here.”  
Ichabod hoods his eyes, crosses the brief span between them. They kiss again. It's no longer for comfort. The skin beneath Henry's hands is as hot as this place is supposed to be. But it isn't hot, here. It's cold. And it's dark. It's always night. It could never be anything else.  
Ichabod's mouth is on his neck. Kissing, then biting. Breaking the skin. (Henry hears his own cry of shock like he's underwater- a hollow howl distorted by a medium that has mass and life and will of its own.) Then kisses again, tenderly. Wearing down jagged pain into a voluptuous ache that makes Henry dig his fingers into Ichabod's arms. Ichabod's hands are at his collar, unbuttoning the first button of his shirt.  
“Not here,” Henry rasps. The door is closed and bolted, but there lingers the terror that it could fly open, of its own accord. But what's beyond the door for Henry to fear? What figure? Whose eyes?  
He will suffer, though, Ichabod to move him so that his back's to the wall, then kneel before him. Henry presses his hands against the wall, spreads his fingers. He will not touch.  
Yes, he will.  
Ichabod's hair is soft. His skin is soft. To go with all of the soft things Henry finds himself feeling. (Melting into a dew.) He can barely recognize himself. Better that this is someone else. With his head thrown back and his hands in Ichabod's hair, coming in his mouth.  
Henry can't move. He won't. He'll stay here forever. He trembles. His eyes are clenched shut. He can't breathe.  
But then, Ichabod stands, and Henry's eyes open, as though of their own accord, unconnected to him. And Henry has to watch him stand, has to turn his head to watch Ichabod walk toward Henry's bedchamber. Has to follow him.  
Mercifully, then, all he has to do is remain still as Ichabod removes his clothes. Then, all he has to do is lie still under him. Like this, it's easy to pretend that it's someone else. That it's not him. How could it be him? He's dead.  
Something will always betray you.  
“Take me,” Henry whispers, “Fuck me.”  
As though he didn't hear, Ichabod continues to kiss him, to pet and gentle him. Henry's about to repeat himself- it thrills him as much as it angers him to be forced to do so- when he's moved by Ichabod, into a humiliating position. All but cleaved in twain. The pain is exquisite. As is the shame-- at moaning, quivering with the potency of a young man.  
Breathless, Ichabod says against his ear, “This was how you were made,” kisses his neck, his cheek.  
“Not precisely like this, I think you'll find.”  
“Your mother's cunt was never so fine.”  
“Stop it, or you'll make me laugh.”  
But before the end, he feels it, too. Wrapped in the pain is a grain of strange pleasure. It worries at him, and he at it, until it overtakes him. He barely notices Ichabod bring himself off. He's irrelevant, now. He could be anybody, on top of Henry. This is where all men are truly created equal.  
This has happened before, and it'll happen again. Hell is a mouth, with only the stupid, cyclical drives of a mouth. It takes Henry in, chews him up. He finds that he's being digested, slowly dissolving into nothing. It feels like nothing, and for a moment, he's even grateful. It's finally over, and he no longer has to be himself. Too soon, though, he remembers. What he is, and what this place is.  
And he finds himself spat out yet again.


End file.
